With the development of multi-core processors, applications no longer achieve regular performance improvements due to increases in clock speeds. Often, applications fail to take full advantage of the capabilities of system hardware. The Intel® Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) was developed to take advantage of multi-core processor hardware. Because the data plane must run at such a high speed, however, the functions implemented in the data plane have been limited. For example, the DPDK is limited to lower-layer packet processing (Open Systems Interconnection (“OSI”) layers 1-3) for performing simple services, such as packet forwarding. The DPDK does not support higher-level packet processing (OSI layers 4+) in the data plane. This is because adding these functions using the same technology will adversely impact packet processing performance.
To provide higher-level packet processing, some systems use a hypervisor (i.e., virtual machine manager) to run an isolated operating system that performs higher level packet processing. These solutions are inefficient, however, because they require the additional complexity, cost, and/or overhead of running a virtualized operating system. These conventional solutions also isolate data between operating system instances, which can cause problems when instances need to share data and/or system resources. Thus, tools for OSI layer 4 and above processing without needing a hypervisor are desirable for achieving greater efficiency and processing speed.
Systems and methods consistent with the present disclosure increase the speed of domain name system (“DNS”) packet processing by leveraging the data plane. The present disclosure includes several embodiments. For example, in certain embodiments, systems and methods for providing an extended data plane packet processing tool chain are disclosed.